WS-FM 2004 Second Call For Papers

[Mario Bravetti]

======================================================================
                     1st International Workshop on
                    Web Services and Formal Methods
                             (WS-FM 2004)

                     February 23, 2004, Pisa, Italy
   Workshop affiliated to COORDINATION 2004, February 24 - 27, 2004
   Homepage: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~lucchi/ws-fm04/
======================================================================

SCOPE

 Web Services technology aims at providing standard mechanisms for
 describing the interface and the services available on the web, as well
 as protocols for locating such services and invoking them (e.g. WSDL,
 UDDI, SOAP). Innovations are moving towards two main directions:
 The first one tends to the definition of new standards
 that support the specification of complex services out of
 simpler ones (the so called Web Service choreography).
 Several proposals have been already set up: BPML, XLANG and
 BizTalk, WSFL, BPEL4WS, etc...
 The second approach consists of the design of new (meta-)Web Services to
 be exploited at run-time by other Web Services: e.g. managing
 the cooperation of Web Services or acting as dynamic registry services.

 Formal methods, which provide formal machinery for representing and
 analysing the behavior of communicating concurrent/distributed systems,
 may potentially play a fundamental role in the development of such
 innovations. First of all they may help in understanding the basic
 mechanisms (in terms of semantics) which characterize different
 choreography languages and to focus on the essence of new features that
 are needed. Secondly they may provide a formal basis for reasoning about
 Web Service semantics (behaviour and equivalence): e.g. for
 realizing registry services where retrieval is based on the meaning of a
 service and not just a Web Service name. Thirdly also studies on
 formal coordination paradigms can be exploited for developing mechanisms
 for complex run-time Web Service coordination. Finally, given the
 importance of critical application areas for Web Services like
 E-commerce, the development of the Web Service technology can certainly
 take advantage from formal analisys of security properties and
 performance in concurrency theory.

 The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working
 on Web Services and Formal Methods in order to activate a fruitful
 collaboration in this direction of research. This, potentially, could
 also have a great impact on the current standardization phase of Web
 Service technologies.

LIST OF TOPICS
 
 The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
 
   - Protocols and standards for WS (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc... )
   - Languages and descripion methodologies for 
     Coreography/Orchestration/Workflow  
     (BPML, XLANG and BizTalk, WSFL, BPEL4WS, etc... )
   - Coordination techniques for WS
     (transactions, agreement, coordination services, etc...)
   - Semantics-based dynamic WS discovery services 
     (based on Semantic Web/Ontology techniques or other semantic theories)
   - Security, Performance Evaluation and Quality of Service of WS
   - Semi-structured data and XML related technologies
   - Comparisons with different related technologies/approaches

SUBMISSIONS

 Submissions may be of two forms:
   - Original papers (neither published nor submitted to other
     conferences/workshops)
   - Contribution papers (possibly published or currently submitted)
 In both cases the paper should be up to 12 pages 12 pt.

 Accepted original papers will be published in the workshop proceedings:
 contacts with Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier)
 have been established to publish them as an ENTCS volume.
 
 A time-slot will be reseved for the presentation at the workshop of a
 limited number of accepted contribution papers.

 Moreover, full versions of papers selected among both original
 and contribution papers will be likely invited for publication
 in a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier).

 Papers should be submitted following the instructions at the workshop 
 homepage: http://www.cs.unibo.it/~lucchi/ws-fm04/

IMPORTANT DATES

 December 15, 2003: Submission deadline
 January  26, 2004: Notification of acceptance
 February  9, 2004: Pre-Final version
 February 23, 2004: Workshop date

PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS

 Mario Bravetti and Gianluigi Zavattaro     

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

 Roberto Bruni      (University of Pisa)
 Michael Butler     (University of Southampton)
 Rocco De Nicola    (University of Florence)
 Schahram Dustdar   (Wien University of Technology)
 Gianluigi Ferrari  (University of Pisa)
 Peter Furniss      (Choreology Ltd UK) 
 Andy Gordon        (Microsoft Reasearch Cambridge)
 Roberto Gorrieri   (University of Bologna)
 Stefania Gnesi     (CNR Pisa)
 Nickolas Kavantzas (Oracle Co. US) 
 Frank Leymann      (IBM Research Germany) 
 Fabio Martinelli   (CNR Pisa)
 Shin Nakajima      (Hosei University and PRESTO, JST) 
 Manuel Nunez       (University Complutense of Madrid)
 Vladimiro Sassone  (University of Sussex)
 Friedrich Vogt     (Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

 Roberto Bruni, Gianluigi Ferrari, Claudio Guidi,
 Roberto Lucchi, Emilio Tuosto

SPONSORS

 Microsoft Research